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Welcome! You are reading a wiki article about wiki editing. Here, in this brief space, you'll learn practically everything you'll need to know about this subject. * As you read, click "edit" from time to time, to see how the text of the article is formatted. (Try that, right now!) * Make changes to the text whenever you want. (Change something now. It's all right. Really!) * When you want to resume reading, click "article." :* Or, to save your changes, click "Publish." * Use the Table of Contents, below, to begin, or to return to where you left off. Introduction A wiki is an information management system with an unlimited number of users and contributors. Information is stored on pages. Users browse (and sometimes search) to find the page or pages containing information that is of interest to them. If information is missing or incomplete or inaccurate, users themselves fix the problem by editing the wiki. Working together as a self-regulating community of contributors, users collaboratively build a massive, well-organized, consensus-verified body of knowledge. General layout Every wiki page contains an article that consists of a title and editable text. Just above the title is a row of tabs that, among other things, enables you to read, edit, rename, and watch (monitor changes) or unwatch the article. Above the tabs, at the very top, are your personal links, including a link to a wiki page about yourself! To the left of the article is a column of links for navigating the wiki. There is also a Search box for finding a wiki page, or for finding some text on all wiki pages. Basic procedure: Edit, preview, save To contribute to the wiki, click an edit link. Use the one at the top, in the row of tabs, if you want to edit the entire article. Use the one to the right of a section heading if you want to edit only that section. Make changes within the editing window. Under the editing window, you'll find buttons labeled Save and Preview. If you want to see how your changes will look, click Preview. This will show you what the page or section will look like. The editing window is still there, just below the preview. You can make more changes and do another preview if you want. Whenever you are satisfied, click Save. Page History and the Wiki Mantra: Be Bold READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY!!! Be bold! Change things. Add information. Correct any misinformation. And do not worry about doing harm. A wiki is designed to allow any user, including you right here and right now, to change anything at all, and to do so harmlessly. Sounds like a contradiction, doesn't it? Read on. The wiki way is very simple, and it really, really works. Here's how. Every time you "save changes," an entirely new version of the page is created and placed at the top of what is called the page "history." All versions, yours and everyone else's, are retained forever, and are always easily accessible via the history tab at the top. So, if you (or anyone else) ever want to revert to an earlier version of the page, just click the History tab. Beginning with the most recent, this shows a chronological list of all the page versions, each of which is labeled with the date-time and the name of the user who created it. To revert to an earlier version, click on the date-time of the version you want to look at. Then, edit and save that version. In other words, whenever you make "changes" to a wiki, you are not actually changing anything! Instead, you are simply adding your own version of the page to the top of the page history. All other versions are still there, unchanged, unchangeable. Try it. Right now. Be bold! Basic wiki editing Wiki markup Wiki editing is easy! You can just type plain text and it will be displayed where you put it, in an attractive font, without any special formatting. This allows anyone, even a complete novice, to contribute to the wiki! But neatly formatting your text is still rather important. Normal Web page formatting is known as HTML, or "Hypertext Markup Language," and it can be a pain. But thanks to the clever shorthand that the wiki automatically translates for you, you'll actually be generating high-quality HTML without even knowing it! This shorthand is called "wiki markup." Read on, and explore. When you want to see what the markup actually looks like, click the edit link for that section. Try it now. Your browser's back-up button will bring you back to where you were. Paragraphs, empty lines and spaces A paragraph is text that begins in the first space on a line and extends as far as you like. A blank line precedes each new paragraph. You may, if you wish, put each sentence or phrase on its own line; however, without blank lines between them, those sentences and phrases will all be part of the same paragraph. So, to separate your text into normal paragraphs, simply put blank or empty lines between each paragraph. And, never "indent" your paragraphs using empty spaces at the beginning of a line! Text will look very odd indeed, like this, if you begin a line with an empty space! Indentation, bullets and numbered lists Indentation : An indented paragraph begins with a colon (:) in the first space. : You don't need blank lines between indented paragraphs. :: Two colons (::) produce a double indent, and so on. Bullets * An asterisk (*) in the first space produces a bulleted word, sentence or paragraph. * You don't need blank lines between bullets. ** Two asterisks (**) produce a sub-bullet, and so on. :* Or, you can combine colons and asterisks (:*) for "indented bullets." Numbered lists # A line in a numbered list begins with a number sign (#). # The next item in the list also begins with a number sign, and so on. ## A sub-list begins with two number signs (##). ## The sub-list continues with two number signs. # The main list resumes with the next single number sign, and so on. # A list may not have blank lines between items. #: But if you want, you can put unnumbered lines in the middle of a numbered list by combining number signs with colons (#:) or with asterisks (#*). # The list can be as long as you want. Any line that does not begin with a number sign signals the end of the list. Bold and italicized text Surround text with two apostrophes to produce italicized text for emphasis. Use three apostrophes for bold text. Use five apostrophes for bold italicized text. Sections You've probably already seen how sections are defined. If not, edit this section to observe it right now. As you can see, section headings are lines of text that begin and end with equals signs, like this: This text would be a section heading if it were on a line by itself Major section The text of a major section heading is on a line that begins and ends with fewer equals signs than any of its subsections (as few as two). Subsection A subsection heading is a line that begins and ends with more equals signs. You can use three, four, five or six equals signs to produce deeply nested levels, whenever you need them. Tables of contents Whenever you have more than three sections on a page, a table of contents is generated automatically! It appears just above the first section. Hyperlinks and creating new pages If you place a URL on a wiki page, it automatically displays as a hyperlink, like this: http://www.thephoenixsociety.org/ But most often you will want something else to appear as the link. So you should surround the URL with single square brackets [ ]. This will cause the link to appear as a number, like this: http://www.thephoenixsociety.org/. But if you put a blank space followed by some text after the URL (still inside those brackets), it will look like this: the Phoenix Society. The tiny "arrow-out" symbol lets the reader know that this is a link to an external site. Wiki links and new wiki pages It's all about links! The true power of the wiki is unleashed by the ease with which you can hyperlink to other wiki pages and create entirely new wiki pages. The most important wiki markup you will ever learn is the use of double square brackets: . To create a hyperlink to a page called "Mystery of the Mary Celeste," you need only surround the words Mystery of the Mary Celeste with double square brackets. But what if there is no such wiki page? Not a problem! Text inside double square brackets shows up as a red link when there is no such page. And that's good! To create an entirely new wiki page, just click on a red link! You'll see a blank editing window under the title of the new page. When you save, the page is created. : You may have been wondering when you'd learn how to create pages for yourself. Well, now you know! Use double square brackets to produce hyperlinks to pages that don't exist. Click on those links. Edit those new pages. Unlike URLs, wiki page names can contain blank spaces. So, you must use a vertical pipe symbol | at the end of the page title to separate it from the words you wish to display as the link. Using this syntax, the words all about the Mary Celeste, or any other text, can be the hyperlink to the page called Mystery of the Mary Celeste. Namespaces Talk: discussing the content of the wiki User: providing information about everyone who uses the wiki Category: organizing everything on the wiki Template: making difficult formatting easy File: providing images, documents and multimedia Advanced wiki markup Tables Templates with variables Parser functions and magic words